Project Alpha

Project Alpha was a hoax designed by
James Randi, Steve Shaw (a.k.a.
Banachek), and Mike Edwards from
1979-1983. Randi trained two young mentalists/magicians—Banachek was 18 and
Edwards 17 when the project began—to fake psychic powers while being
investigated in a serious scientific setting. They were able to fool the
scientists for four years through more than 160 hours of experiments on
their paranormal powers.

In 1979, James S. McDonnell, board
chairman of McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft and devotee of the paranormal, gave
$500,000 to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, for the
establishment of the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research. Randi saw
this as an opportunity to disprove the complaint of many parapsychologists
that they were unable to do properly controlled experiments because of lack
of funding.

Randi believed that funding was the least of
their problems. In his view, the main obstacle to parapsychology was its
“strong pro-psychic bias.” This bias blinds researchers to numerous flaws in
their protocols, almost all of which are related to their naïveté regarding
human deception and their inexperience at detecting such deception. Some
parapsychologists, such as Stanley Krippner, then president of the
Parapsychological Association, agreed with Randi that qualified, experienced
conjurors were essential for design, implementation, and evaluation of
experiments in parapsychology, especially where deception--involuntary or
deliberate--by subjects or experimenters, might be possible. But many
parapsychologists ignored Randi, as they had been ignoring similar criticism
for more than a century and a half.

Randi trained Banachek and Edwards so well that out of 300
applicants they alone were selected as subjects. The director of the
McDonnell Lab was physics professor Peter R. Phillips, who had been dabbling
in parapsychology for about ten years. He told the press that his lab would
investigate “psychokinetic metal bending (PKMB) by children.” Randi sent
Phillips a list of protocols (he called them “caveats”) that should be
instituted when testing human subjects to prevent deception. One of the
things he warned him about was not to allow the subjects to run the
experiments by changing the protocol, a practice Randi knew is a common ploy
of alleged psychics. He also warned that capricious demands by subjects
might well be the means of introducing conditions that would permit
subterfuge. Randi also advised that a conjuror be present during the
experiments and even volunteered himself at his own expense to do the
observing. Phillips told Randi he was quite confident he could conduct
proper experiments without Randi’s help. Randi writes

Though I had specifically warned Phillips against allowing
more than one test object (spoon or key, for example) to be placed before a
subject during tests, the lab table was habitually littered with objects.
The specimens were not permanently marked, but instead bore paper tags
attached with string loops. Banachek and Edwards found it easy to switch
tags after the objects had been accurately measured, thus producing the
illusion that an object handled in the most casual fashion had undergone a
deformation (Randi: 1983a).

Phillips and his lab assistants became convinced the boys
had psychic powers but they also thought of their work as exploratory. In
1981, they took a videotape of the Banacheck/Edwards sessions to a
convention of the Parapsychological Association. Their colleagues at the
convention are said to have laughed at the video and noted numerous weak
spots in their protocols.
Soon afterward the McDonnell folks began instituting protocols that had been
suggested by Randi. Almost simultaneously they found that the boys seemed to
have lost their ability to produce psychic effects. It was at this point
that the boys were dismissed and Randi made the hoax public. Randi’s take on
the project after it was completed was

If Project Alpha resulted in Parapsychologists (real
parapsychologists!) awakening to the fact that they are able to be deceived,
either by subjects or themselves, as a result of their convictions and their
lack of expertise in the arts of deception, then it has served its purpose.
Those who fell into the trap invited that fate; those who pulled back from
the brink deserve our applause (Randi: 1983b).

Twenty years later he comments: “The effect of Alpha didn’t
last long” (personal correspondence). By that I think he meant that this
exposé, like many others before it, has had little impact on the
parapsychological community. Rather than thank skeptics for vividly
demonstrating how easy it is for very intelligent, highly trained
professionals to be fooled by conjurers, they ignore the skeptics. Or worse,
they accuse them of “offensive incredulity.”

Some might
think that Project Alpha was unethical. I don't. The experiment may have
deceived and embarrassed some people, but that was not its purpose. It was a
social experiment that was necessary to demonstrate a charge that skeptics
had been making for over 150 years. Parapsychologists, no matter how
intelligent or well-trained they are in science, are susceptible to
deception and self-deception. This has been evident at least since 1882 in
the first experiment by the Society for
Psychical Research.

In 1882, Sir William Fletcher
Barrett, a professor of physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin,
and a few friends, including the Cambridge philosopher
Henry Sidgwick, formed the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The goal of
the society, in part, according to Sidgwick was to

drive the objector into the position of being forced either
to admit the phenomena as inexplicable, at least by him, or to accuse the
investigators either of lying or cheating or of a blindness or forgetfulness
incompatible with any intellectual condition except absolute idiocy.

SPR's first scientific study would have
Sidgwick eating those words.

Barrett led SPR's first study. It involved a clergyman’s four teenage daughters and a
servant girl who claimed they could communicate telepathically. He did a
number of experiments with the girls and came away declaring that the odds
of their being able to guess correctly in one experiment “were over a
million to one.” The odds of their guessing correctly five cards in row were
“over 142 million to one” and guessing correctly eight consecutive names in
a row were “incalculably greater” (Christopher 1970: 10). More men of
integrity with high degrees were brought in to witness the telepathic powers
of the Creery girls and Jane Dean, the servant girl. All the scientists
agreed that there was no trickery involved. How did they know? They had
looked very carefully for signs of it and couldn’t find any!

A skeptic might ask: What are the odds that children can fool some very
intelligent scientists, even if the children come from a clergyman’s home?
The answer is: the odds are very good. Almost immediately the
scientists were criticized for being taken in by tricks any magician could
perform. It took some time to sink in but eventually the experimenters
realized that for some reason human beings like to deceive each other. They
use all kinds of non-verbal signals to communicate, which can give the
appearance of telepathy. They use glances (up, down, right, left for the
four suits of a deck of cards, for example), coughs, sighs, yawns, and
noises with their shoes. Other cheaters use Morse code with coins and
various other tricks known to conjurers. Sometimes gestures to various parts
of the body have a prearranged meaning.

Barrett and his colleagues were not oblivious to the
problems of cheating or non-telepathic explanations for what they were
observing. The experiments are described by
Susan
Blackmore:

Typically someone thought of a name, or a playing
card, or a familiar household object, and the girls could apparently
guess, almost always correctly, what had been chosen. The authors
discussed muscle reading and involuntary guidance and concluded that these
could not be responsible for the impressive results. It is interesting
that right at the start they point out that the word 'thought-reading' was
used only as a 'popular and provisional description, and is in no way
intended to exclude an explanation resting on a physical basis' (Barrett
el al. 1882, p. 33).

So the enterprise began well, with a determination
to rule out obvious errors, an open-minded attempt to test whether the
phenomena really did exist and an eye to possible theories for the future.
But I should add ... that it was fed by a hope that the phenomena would
prove to be real and would, in their words, 'necessitate a modification of
that general view of the relation of mind to matter to which modern
science has long been gravitating' (Barrett et al. 1882, p. 34).

It took six years for these
rather intelligent men to discover the girls’ trickery. While one group of
scientists was validating the Creery group, another from SRP was validating
the amazing telepathic feats of a 19-year-old entertainer named George A. Smith
and his partner in deception,
Douglas Blackburn. Smith became secretary of the SPR (Christopher 1970)
and had Blackburn not eventually published a series of articles explaining
how they fooled the scientists, the world might never have known the details
of the trickery (Gardner 1992). The early scientific
studies demonstrate the naïveté of the experimenters and the need for
experts in non-verbal communication and deception, namely, conjurors or
gamblers, to help them set up protocols to prevent cheating.

Unfortunately, the lesson of the Creery girls and the
Smith-Blackburn hoax went largely unheeded by most
paranormal investigators in the ensuing 150 years, making Project Alpha
necessary.